The Christian Year | Page 4

for his the duty of two little curacies. The father lived on to
the age of ninety. John Keble's love for God and his devotion to the
Church had often been expressed in verse. On days which the Church
specially celebrated, he had from time to time written short poems to
utter from the heart his own devout sense of their spiritual use and
meaning. As the number of these poems increased, the desire rose to
follow in like manner the while course of the Christian Year as it was
marked for the people by the sequence of church services, which had
been arranged to bring in due order before the minds of Christian
worshippers all the foundations of their faith, and all the elements of a
religious life. A book of poems, breathing faith and worship at all
points, and in all attitudes of heavenward contemplation, within the
circle of the Christian Year, would, he hoped, restore in many minds to
many a benumbed form life and energy.
In 1825, while the poems of the Christian Year were gradually being
shaped into a single work, a brother became able to relieve John Keble
in that pious care for which his father had drawn him away from a great
University career, and he then went to a curacy at Hursley, four or five
miles from Winchester.
In 1827--when its author's age was thirty-five--"The Christian Year"
was published. Like George Herbert, whose equal he was in piety
though not in power, Keble was joined to the Church in fullest
sympathy with all its ordinances, and desired to quicken worship by
putting into each part of the ritual a life that might pass into and raise
the life of man. The spirit of true religion, with a power beyond that of
any earthly feuds and controversies, binds together those in whom it

really lives. Setting aside all smaller questions of the relative value of
different earthly means to the attainment of a life hidden with Christ in
God, Christians of all forms who are one in spirit have found help from
"John Keble's Christian Year, and think of its guileless author with
kindly affection. Within fiveand -twenty years of its publication, a
hundred thousand copies had been sold. The book is still diffused so
widely, in editions of all forms, that it may yet go on, until the circle of
the years shall be no more, living and making live.
Four years after "The Christian Year appeared, Keble was appointed (in
1831) to the usual five years' tenure of the Poetry
Professorship at
Oxford. Two years after he had been appointed Poetry Professor, he
preached the Assize Sermon, and took for his theme "National
Apostasy." John Henry Newman, who had obtained his Fellowship at
Oriel some years before the publication of "The Christian Year," and
was twenty-six years old when it appeared, received from it a strong
impulse towards the endeavour to revive the spirit of the Church by
restoring life and soul to all her ordinances, and even to the minutest
detail of her ritual. The deep respect felt for the author of "The
Christian Year" gave power to the sermon of 1833 upon National
Apostasy, and made it the startingpoint of the Oxford movement
known as Tractarian, from the issue of tracts through which its
promoters sought to stir life in the clergy and the people; known also as
Puseyite because it received help at the end of the year 1833 from Dr.
Pusey, who was of like age with J. H. Newman, and then Regius
Professor of Hebrew. There was a danger, which some then foresaw, in
the nature of this endeavour to put life into the Church; but we all now
recognise the purity of Christian zeal that prompted the attempt to
make dead forms of ceremonial glow again with spiritual fire, and
serve as aids to the recovery of light and warmth in our devotions.
It was in 1833 that Keble, by one earnest sermon, with a pure life at the
back of it, and this book that had prepared the way, gave the direct
impulse to an Oxford movement for the reformation of the Church. The
movement then began. But Keble went back to his curacy at Hursley.
Two years afterwards the curate became vicar, and then Keble married.
His after-life continued innocent and happy. He and his wife died

within two months of each other, in the came year, 1866. He had taken
part with his friends at Oxford by writing five of their Tracts,
publishing a few sermons that laboured towards the same end, and
editing a "Library of the Fathers." In 1847 he produced another volume
of poems, "Lyra Innocentium," which associated doctrines of the
Church with the lives of children, whom he loved, though his